Just eight weeks ago Holiday Swap, the home share/swap booking platform – and sister company of Global Airlines – was invited to join the NextGen FDI program in the UAE. The company announced it will move its headquarters to Dubai as part of that program. That should not impact the nascent airline’s efforts to launch; they are separate organizations, albeit both associated with a common holding company. But the success of Holiday Swap has been part of the pitch for Global Airlines, as founder James Asquith boosted his reputation for building startups in challenging travel verticals.
Reviewing data on the Holiday Swap site as it exists today, however, raises a number of questions with respect to how the company chooses to present the data around its claimed success.
As part of the review PaxEx.Aero contacted the company for comment. Chief Operating Officer Andy McGinlay suggests that the data reviewed is “from our old platform (with known quality issues) that we have parked before relaunching.” Timing for when that relaunch will occur was not provided. Nor was an explanation for why the company keeps the site with known problems online.
And, even with that caveat, the company made many public claims about its success, based on that data set. Some of those flaws are detailed below.
Just how many properties are there?
The announcement claims more than 120,000 listed properties. Our review of the public website showed closer to 100,000 total listings, of which only approximately 36,000 were available to book.
Moreover, the company appears to be shifting away from its peer-to-peer roots, “a community-based platform that connects holidaymakers online, enabling them to swap homes or rent directly from one another.” Instead, it has chosen to act as a consolidator of managed apartments and hotels around the world.
McGinlay touts the company’s advanced integration with property management companies (PMCs) to help boost the number of available properties on the site. He also notes that additional partnerships are due online imminently, boosting the number of listings past 140,000. He expects the number of listings to further double within six months. This target is well below the 1 million projected for the end of 2023 on the company’s website (screen shot below) and even below the 400,000 targeted in the September blurb the company published as part of the FDI program plans.
McGinlay also suggests that the total number of properties in the system – not just those available to book – is the statistic worth counting, as “on some occasions our Property Management Company partners have to pull them offline.”
Quantity over quality?
Adding professional PMCs to the site certainly helps boost the number of listings available. It also creates challenges with respect to the quality of those listings. A PMC may control several units in an apartment building, for example. Those would be listed with the different photos of the interiors and should be seen as reasonable listings.
There are more than 5,000 properties with “hotel” in the listing name. These options cover approximately 65 physical locations, with multiple rooms available at each. While the PMC may, indeed have 200 rooms available at a particular hotel property, it seems somewhat disingenuous to claim each as a unique listing in this context. Especially when they’re all the same to the consumer.
Digging further into the details, however, revealed some incredible statistics. One PMC is responsible for 28,993 of the 35,774 active listings reviewed. That is an astounding 81% of all active booking options on Holiday Swap’s site running through a single party. Considering all listings – not just those flagged as active – two users appear to control between 35-50% of the total.
Garbage data on display
Holiday Swap also relies on its users and PMC partners to properly manage the listing data. This results in many scenarios which are likely to leave guests disappointed.
One host has approximately 60 “beach front” properties in Bali all located at the same coordinates, about 35 kilometers from the beach.
Some 5,000 listings have no description for the property provided. There are 1,700 entries where the GPS coordinates are 0,0 placing the property in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
One listing reviewed in detail cites the address of the Pan Pacific Hotel in downtown Vancouver while showing images lifted from a home recently sold in Quebec. This is not the only obviously false listing on the site.
McGinlay disputes the use of that term. “There is a varying degree of quality to these listings, as with any platform based on UGC (as we are sure you know),” he shared in an emailed statement. “This categorically does not make them ‘false listings’.”
Yes, this is all user generated content, and it is inevitable that some bad data will creep through. But obviously wrong locations or incomplete bookings should be easy to flag and remove from the system (or, preferably, prevented from being submitted in the first place).
Holiday Swap chose to ignore those flaws and counts the listings in its stats.
Flaws in the listing presentations
More than just ignoring the flaws, the current iteration of the Holiday Swap website arguably endorses them as valid listings. Every property on the site is a “hot new listing” when viewing the details. That bit is built in to the display template and renders even if there is no actual property or rating to show.
McGinlay acknowledged this flaw, noting “it is not meant to be on the live site.” He also assures PaxEx.Aero the company is in the process of revamping the website and app to “replace this with the proper ratings.”
What those “proper ratings” are – and who generates them – remains an open question. Each listing on the site today has a rating. These appear to be have no relation to, well, anything.
Described as “moderator ratings” in the underlying data structure, there are only five options displayed, ranging from 3.75 to 4.1, across the total collection of listings. This includes properties which are not fully populated, listings with inaccurate locations, and other challenges.
Presumably the “proper ratings” data should come from reviews of confirmed guests. That’s the sort of rating/review ecosystem on which similar platforms thrive. Alas, just 26 properties inspected show evidence that guest reviews exists. And that’s that’s just a number on the webpage. Perhaps they are available when logged in, but users cannot read those reviews when browsing the listings anonymously.
The availability calendar on the site also appears to be inaccurate. While scant few properties have limits on available dates, when when present those are not reflected on the booking calendar.
Who are the users?
The company claims more than one million monthly users worldwide. Each user who hosts a property is given a ID number when they sign up. Based on the numbering, it appears these are sequential and cover all users, not only those who list a property. A user created at the end of August 2023 showed an ID number just above 686,000.
While 200,000 new users appear to have registered in 2022, just 20,000 have created accounts thus far in 2023. Moreover, fewer than 30% of property hosts have logged in to the system in the past six months; they would not typically be considered active.
Of course, anonymous users browsing the site will add to the active user count. McGinlay implies that’s where the bulk of the action comes from, while withholding further details as commercially sensitive. One third party traffic monitoring site suggests average monthly traffic is closer to 1,000 visitors, not 1,000,000.
Odds that there are really a million unique active monthly users seem rather low.
Data leaks
The listings expose the full name and email address of every host. This is almost certainly a GDPR violation. They also appear to expose a token assigned to the application install for users; the software supplier suggests those tokens be kept secret. When contacted about the email data leak the company confirmed our analysis and promptly resolved the issue. No word on whether users were notified their email address was leaked.
Perhaps the next version of Holiday Swap will truly deliver a compelling booking platform with a strong user base and quality data controls. But the claims made on the website are misleading at best. And, as with the early efforts to raise funds for Global Airlines, the loose relationship with numbers should raise flags to those interacting with – or funding – the company today.
A favor to ask while you're here...
Did you enjoy the content? Or learn something useful? Or generally just think this is the type of story you'd like to see more of? Consider supporting the site through a donation (any amount helps). It helps keep me independent and avoiding the credit card schlock.
Steve Last says
I share your concern that the backing for Global Airlines is not all it claims to be – shades of Theranos, Wework and FTX are coming to mind. The very first property shown on Holidayswap’s current website is a “luxurious 9-bedroom, 7.5-bathroom villa” in Florida, which is a commercial rental property and not a “holiday home swap”. But the address provided is a very small townhouse about 19 miles from the property described, with none of the facilities claimed.
In the UK a huge percentage of properties are actually small furnished rentals in industrial areas in the north of England, all posted by the rental same agency, and not likely to be vacation properties: some have addresses which turn out to be buildings on industrial estates. Other properties have ludicrous photos and/or addresses. Limehouse Church Institute, a grade 2 listed Edwardian building, is shown for an apartment with an address of “Canary Wharf, Londra E14, Birleşik Krallık”, one of many seemingly uploaded at the same time by someone who one might suspect is from Turkey.
Your assessment of the web traffic as being of the order of 1000 visits per month (i.e. 30-odd per day) compares to that of competitors like Homeexchange (300 thousand per month) and Lovehomeswap (160 thousand). Homeexchange says it has 150k “subscribers in 145 countries”, compared to Holidayswap’s claimed 250k users in 185 countries 3 years ago, and a million today. So quite how the £330 million valuation quoted recently in a London “Times” newspaper is reached is hard to see.
As a final “reality check”: on Trustpilot, information “written by the company” says “Holiday Swap is the world leader in home exchange vacations. With over 1,000,000 users in 185 countries”. But it has only 57 Trustpilot reviews, the earliest dating from just over 14 months ago, which is strange for a business started in 2017 and claiming to have 250,000 users by 2020. All except three are 5 star reviews, 23 of them being posted on only 4 days in September and December 2022. (The other 3 are highly critical 1 or 2 star). By comparison, rival business Homeexchange’s Trustpilot reviews start from 2013 and total over 5200, almost 100 times more than Holidayswap’s 57, despite having only one sixth of Holidayswap’s claimed users.
One must hope that investors in this and Global Airlines have done their due diligence – certainly it seems questionable whether many other journalists have done so.